


I Will Follow You Into the Dark

by pieces_of_jade



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:22:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24411250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pieces_of_jade/pseuds/pieces_of_jade
Summary: Rey was going nowhere fast before she finds some mysterious tracks on the side of the road and decides to follow their path into the darkness beyond.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	I Will Follow You Into the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> un-beta'd one-shot (because I am terrible at multi-chapter fics and this is the first fanfic I've written in years)

Rey wasn’t one for looking back. For starters, she had nothing to really look back TOWARDS, per se. Just a long line of broken homes, lonely nights, and abandoned dreams. She hefted the lone, woebegone knapsack higher on her back.

‘Fitting’, she thought bitterly, ‘That all I own can be carried on my shoulders.’

Nothing she cared about, though. There wasn’t really anything she cared about. Well, except for getting off the side of this God-forsaken dusty road at 2 am and going towards somewhere, anywhere, else.

Jakku was behind her. Literally and figuratively. And the horizon was ahead of her. Or at least, she figured it had to be. It was still too dark to see exactly where she was headed. The stars were hidden and the moonlight muffled behind thick, dark clouds overhead.

Suddenly, the darkness was pierced with a blinding beam of light.

Rey immediately turned around and squinted at the source. Artificial light cut a man-made path through the gloom, leading back towards a pitch-black, sleek sports car that almost blended in with the darkness that surrounded it. The roaring machine was hurtling faster than her towards parts unknown.

Quickly, Rey stuck the hand not clinging to all her worldly possessions out towards the side of the road. Thumb raised (and silent prayer recited), she hoped the car would stop, the driver would be kind, and her journey would hasten faster towards its end (wherever that was).

But the car simply flew past her, dashing past her lone figure like most of her fantasies of finding belonging, of having a family all her own.

Bitter disappointment was a well-known companion to Rey, but somehow she was still naive enough to hope. Sighing, she continued her trudge forward, looking down at the dirt that scuffed her (at one point) white Converse. Perhaps that would be all anyone found of her one day -- just some beat-up old shoes that told of a world-weary traveller too poor to afford anything new (and too alone to find a match set).

She walked for another hour before she stumbled upon something that surprised her. The road, which had been nothing but a long, empty stretch in the middle of a desert, suddenly looked disturbed by deposits of dirt. Deep tire tracks in the dirt she was standing on showed that a car veered a hard right off the pavement.

Confused and intrigued, Rey wildly looked around her surroundings but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

‘Huh,’ she thought, ‘That doesn’t make any sense. A car with tires like this should be pretty noticeable.’

With nothing better to do or sign to direct her path, Rey found her feet following the tracks further into the dusty wilderness. She had always been something of a scavenger, and the allure of finding something like the huge machine that clearly made the grooves under her feet was too good to pass up. But as she continued to follow the trail, her mind became uneasy. The treads had clearly started to swerve partway through, and the dirt looked too fresh to be from a long-abandoned vehicle.

‘Maybe it crashed somewhere?’ Rey gnawed at her lower lip, scanning the horizon that was still too dark to see anything meaningful, ‘Oh God. What if the driver is unconscious? Or injured? Or dead? I don’t want to see a mangled body. Ugh. Please God no.’

Hesitant, but still determined, Rey continued down the dark path until she noticed a faint outline in the distance. It was a slightly lighter smudge of black against the inky abyss. Rey cautiously continued her approach, wondering what she would find.

As she moved closer to the blob, she realized it was the same sports car from before. Startled, Rey stopped to pull out the only weapon she had in her possession from her pack. Well, it could potentially work as a weapon, perhaps, if one considered the pen to be mightier than the sword and words to have more power than a good baseball bat. Her well-worn copy of Intro to Mechanical Engineering could be thrown at someone’s head, at the very least, and Rey had great aim.

She moved even quicker towards her find once suitably armed. Bracing herself, she noticed that the car, despite not being built with off-roading in mind, still looked to be in mint condition (if one pardoned the dust caking the bottom of the chassis). More confused than ever, Rey knocked tentatively on the tinted passenger side window before darting back to take a more defensible position.

Silence.

Slowly, Rey approached the car again, this time knocking a little louder, before once again scurrying back.

Nothing. Not even a hint of movement behind the glass.

Stealing herself one final time, Rey advanced on the car again. Knocking firmly on the side door, she called out, “Hello?”

When nothing answered other than the anticipatory quiet before daybreak (which was surely going to happen any time now, going by the glowing digital numbers on her watch face), she said, “Alright, fair warning, I’m opening the door now.”

Reaching towards the handle, she yanked, hard, and was startled when it swung open easily under her firm grip. She had half expected it to be locked.

She peered inside, and gasped, dropping her copy of Brontë on the ground. It was absolutely pristine. High quality, supple leather seating with exquisite detailing, glossy chrome controls, and shiny buttons met her curious gaze. There wasn’t a single hint of a personal touch, a lone crumb, or really anything else to denote that the car had been anywhere other than a fancy showroom. That is, except for the giant figure she saw slumped over the steering wheel, starkly illuminated by the interior lighting.

Leaning forward, she gently tapped him on the shoulder, “Hey. Hello? Mister?”

He didn’t move other than slumping down slightly farther on top of the dashboard.

Rey scurried around to the other side of the car and quickly opened the driver’s side door. She gasped sharply at what she saw.

A man, turned towards her, was clearly unconscious, a slight trickle of blood oozing from the side of his head. He had deathly pale skin, contrasted even more starkly by a scattering of moles that dotted his face like constellations in the sky of his skin. He had a large, slightly crooked nose and, she guessed, rather prominent ears from the way the tops peeked out at her from underneath the inky waves of his dark hair. He had full, pouty lips that were slightly parted as if he were merely sleeping.

Rey immediately reached towards his neck to try and feel for a pulse.

‘There it is -- thank God,’ she thought, as she felt the beat chugging along steadily, if a little slowly.

Looking at the fuel meter, it looked like there was still enough gas to get them back on the road to the nearest town. He might have been a bit of an ass, leaving her behind in the literal and metaphorical dust when she stuck her thumb out for a ride, but he definitely didn’t deserve to be abandoned in the middle of a desert while she absconded with his car. Hopefully, he wouldn’t wake while she was driving so she could drop him off at the hospital before he noticed anything was amiss.

‘Or at least not panic if -- when -- he wakes,’ she rapidly amended her thoughts, ‘I don’t want him to never wake up.’

And it was true -- at the very least she wanted him to wake up to confirm that he wasn’t dead and she wasn’t driving around with a corpse. At the most, Rey begrudgingly admitted within the privacy of her mind, that she was rather curious about him.

“Er, so sorry about this, if you can hear me sir,” Rey muttered, “But I’m just going to have to --”

She cut off rather awkwardly, gesturing towards his prone form as if that explained the whole of the strange situation she found herself in.

Struggling to flop his large, heavy body over the center console so he could rest in the passenger seat was a difficult task. But Rey had been forced to witness, and bear, worse when a few of her old foster fathers would come back blackout drunk. As she shoved and nudged his body onto the other side, she noticed a few more intriguing details about him.

He was clearly dressed in a fine suit. Pressed slacks with creases perfectly down the center, a swanky Submariner on his wrist, and a crisp white dress shirt underneath a black suit jacket made sense, given the car he was driving. But instead of a fancy set of Oxfords, she noticed a pair of scuffed black Converse, almost as dingy as her own, covering the biggest feet she had ever seen.

‘Though,’ she thought, only slightly hysterically, ‘This man is the biggest person I have ever seen. Certainly the heaviest.’

He was a veritable giant, which was saying something, as Rey was slightly tall for a woman, and deceptively strong under her wiry build. His hands, still limply gripping the steering wheel, could’ve easily encompassed her entire waist, and his build was rather tree-like, if Rey did say so herself.

‘Finally!’ she thought, as she finished forcing him into the passenger’s side.

Grinning, Rey had barely finished congratulating herself before he toppled over to the right -- right out the door she had left open, in her haste to check on him, and onto the earth below.

‘Shit!’ she thought, as she once again ran around the car to make sure he was okay.

Hoisting him up in her arms (and retrieving her forgotten book from beside his head), he didn’t look any worse for wear other than being considerably more dusty. Cramming him back into his seat, as upright as she could manage, she quickly buckled him in and shut the door before climbing into the driver’s seat, throwing her belongings into the back.

The keys were still in the ignition, as if waiting for her to notice them, dangling from a curious-looking keychain that looked like a small pair of golden dice.

Turning them to “Start”, the car once again roared to life as Rey quickly glanced one more time at the mysterious man by her side. She hoped she would be able to take them where they needed to go. She even, tentatively, quietly, felt a spark of hope ignite within her heart that she would find it, perhaps, with him by her side.

She smoothly shifted into reverse, backing up to retrace the broken path that led her here in the first place, back towards the paved road that was whole and waiting ahead.

She never even noticed that the first rays of the sun had finally broken over the horizon.


End file.
